A Collusion of Art and Craft

Menu

The Biggest Project so far… and a very tired Weasel!

Five years ago (almost to the day in fact) the ‘Werks took on their biggest project ever.

We bought a condo that pretty much looked like crap. Ok, not just looked like, but was in actuality not habitable the first time we saw it.

We closed escrow on the sale of the condo to it’s new owners this week. Not only is it now livable, it is beautiful.

Weasels LOVE cherry wood and copper. Weasels don’t mind laying laminate flooring, but we don’t like installing crown molding and baseboards. In the future, we will farm that out to someone else.

There was a lot of flooring! There is this really nifty thing called a pull bar that helps a lot. Use a rubber faced mallet or hammer with it though, since it makes a ton of noise if you use a regular hammer with the pull bar. Our neighbors let us know that a regular hammer made a lot of noise, although we were pretty deaf at the time and that’s what we think they were telling us.

Ikea cabinets – yeah Ikea. But we built them. And hammered our thumbs in the process. There was a galley style kitchen before and 50,000 dead roaches when we bought it. Now there are new cabinets, new countertops, a new sink and built in cutting board as well as new floors and toekicks. Weasels hate installing toekicks. It involves crawling around on the floor and doing a lot of measuring that some how wasn’t right. Even when we measured three times.

The molding around the doors, the crown molding and the baseboards were all stained and varnished by hand by the head weasel. At times over the past couple of years, the head weasel has had a lot of stained fingernails, hands, arms, feet, legs and many face splotches. Also, varnish for wood acts like fingernail varnish on fingernails, but doesn’t look as good.

Remodeled Bathroom- White! White! Augh!!!!! Not a weasel friendly color, but our realtor reminded us that we were moving out and regular people like white. The bathroom job was not done by weasels, and probably should have been. It took 3 weeks to remodel the bath. At one point, all the weasels had been without showers for 8 days. Not happy weasels!!!!

Also a walk in closet. Painting closet rods seems like it would be a lot easier than it actually is. Paint gets every where. Hands, feet, arms, faces, backs. necks… everywhere! Also – wearing shoes while remodeling is probably a good idea. Hasn’t this been a topic before? Probably will be again.

There are three bedrooms in the condo, but we only took pictures of two. They all pretty much looked the same at the end. The carpet is actually a brown and black stripe that is very nifty. Weasels did baseboards and painting for the bedrooms which was baseboards too much, At least we know about baseboards now though.

So even though I actually talk about doing tiny metal, paper, fiber and other stuff on the blog most of the time, there has been a lot of time where I was lugging 10 gallon paint cans, buying unassembled cabinets and other stuff that was really heavy work. It’s been a long five years but we had six viewings in 48 hours and three offers at the end of those 48 hours. Every offer that came in was at or above our asking price and included comments regarding how beautiful the condo was.

As an artist, I wanted to do a good job, learn new skills (and I sure did!) and create something that people liked. I succeeded in all three areas, plus I got to experiment a little in preparation for our next big project.

What you can’t see is the inside of the doors that lead to the balcony and the courtyard. I painted these copper. All the hardware (cabinet pulls and door knobs) in the common areas are oiled rubbed bronze, which has a coppery color to it in actuality.

With the cherry wood colors and the copper highlights, this condo could easily take on a SteamPunk affect.

We are now looking for a duplex that we will remodel and then rent out. I anticipate (read plan) on doing a lot more cherry, copper and SteamPunk style detailing in these units including copper plate detailing on the cabinet doors and a copper countertop.

I will edit in the pictures of the condo from when we bought it, just to give an idea of what we started with as soon as I transfer them from the other laptop.

So that’s where the weasels have been lately. Now we are back to smaller work as soon as we can find our soldering station in one of the many moving boxes.